The mayor and Houston Professional Fire Fighters Association Local 341 president Bryan Sky-Eagle both said after the vote (with 93 percent of ballots against) that they were open to more bargaining, but it’s unclear whether a deal acceptable to the union members will be reached.

“It is encouraging that the union is willing to resume negotiations,” Parker said in a release. “We will bargain in good faith, but crafting an alternative agreement will require creativity and flexibility now that City Council has approved a new city budget that utilizes all available resources.”

In other words, officials have said, council amended Parker’s proposed budget to add a series of spending items that, in effect, “spent the raise” that had been set aside to cover the provisions in the contract. The terms of the rejected deal would have given firefighters a 4 percent raise beginning Jan. 1 in exchange for restrictions on when they could take time off.

In an update to the union membership after the vote, Sky-Eagle wrote that surveys of members showed the top three reasons the contract was rejected were: A provision that would have forced the chairman of the fire pension board, who is paid by HFD and not by the pension fund, to return to work as a firefighter and do pension work in off hours; that the raise wasn’t enough; and that the restrictions on time off were too stringent. About 54 percent of those surveyed want the pension chairman’s situation to remain the same (i.e. working full time for the pension while drawing a fire department salary). There is a bit more background on the disagreement in this story.

With the no vote, firefighters enter an “evergreen” period under their prior contract that will run through 2016 unless a new agreement is approved. The evergreen situation would provide no raises, but imposes few effective caps on how many firefighters can take time off, raising questions about whether the department’s proposed $507 million budget for the fiscal year that began Tuesday (July 1) includes enough money to cover overtime costs, and whether HFD will repeat the fiscal woes of recent months. Here are several stories explaining that background: One introducing the problem of overtime pay, another explaining how HFD planned to handle it and another written when that plan began to be implemented.